CourseWork: Updates and Highlights

CourseWork, Stanford University's home-grown course management system (CMS), continues to make great strides. Since its pilot in Fall 2001, and campus-wide release in Winter 2002, CourseWork is quickly becoming the preferred CMS across campus. In Fall 2003, 96 percent of courses in the Graduate School of Business and 100 percent of Law School courses used CourseWork.

Per usage statistics, the number of Stanford courses using CourseWork has approximately doubled every year. Based on past trends, there may be as many as 800 CourseWork courses by Winter 2004.

What's New for Winter 2004?

The CourseWork team, part of the Academic Computing group of Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources, is continuing to make improvements to the system to better accommodate the needs and goals of CourseWork's users. The following features and functionalities are slated for a version 3.1 release in Winter Quarter 2004:

Customization of role privileges in a course. Each role within a course (e.g., instructor, guest) comes with default privileges that can be modified.

The addition of three new roles: head TA, dropped student, and a user-definable admin role. More information about these roles and the role-privilege feature can be found in CourseWork's Admin Help at the beginning of Winter Quarter 2004.

The ability to make copies of individual assignments within a course. This is useful for instructors who wish to retain a copy of an original assignment.

Exportation of event sign-up results into a format that can be opened and manipulated in any spreadsheet application.

The ability to limit instructor-only access to a course after the course has ended. Instructors can select this option on the CourseWork request form.

Highlights of Usage, Fall 2003

The VPUE Academic Technology Specialist Program and Stanford University Libraries staff used CourseWork to administer the Stanford Key to Information Literacy (SKIL) test to 1600 incoming students.

Joseph Kautz, Academic Technology Specialist for the Stanford Language Center, uses CourseWork as a support and information portal to improve teaching efficiency and data integrity for the more than 50 language instructors and TAs that he supports.

CourseWork is also making an impact outside of Stanford University since going to open source in June 2003. Denison University, a liberal arts college in Ohio, is using CourseWork on its campus. Locally, a group of graduate students in computer science at San Francisco State University are looking at CourseWork as a case study in object oriented programming and is using CourseWork as the basis for their final project. To help the students understand about design decisions, one of the original designers of CourseWork recently addressed the class as a guest lecturer.

For More Information

To request a CourseWork web site for your course or event, please complete the following form located at:

http://coursework.stanford.edu/coursework/servlet/RequestCourse

CourseWork is available for all faculty and campus organizations.

For more information about CourseWork, go to:

http://aboutcoursework.stanford.edu/